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Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

economist.com

311–320 of 524 posts

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#311
post #257

There's issues where bad people with bad intentions use AI to do bad things. But to an extent the guardrails already built-in are sufficient. The real danger in AI is how it impacts society, our economy, and our perception of self worth. I'm not afraid of rouge agents nearly as much as I'm afraid of us building a permanent underclass of people dependent on whatever scraps the people who devalued their labor decide th…

I had my "wow" moment recently and saw an AI agent do something do over a weekend something that I spent years developing a relatively niche skill might have needed a month to complete. I think the message the team lead takes away right now is "oh, this can be done a lot faster, let's do more!" This is exciting for a bit, but I think it comes at the cost of learning -- and being able to communicate --architectural le…

My personal "wow" moment was less about it being able to do the same that I could do with it, just faster, but instead that together we could could build things that I wasn't able to build before (or unwilling to spend the time to learn maybe). So a bunch of stuff are suddenly "unlocked", as long as you know how to verify it properly.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#312
post #257

There's issues where bad people with bad intentions use AI to do bad things. But to an extent the guardrails already built-in are sufficient. The real danger in AI is how it impacts society, our economy, and our perception of self worth. I'm not afraid of rouge agents nearly as much as I'm afraid of us building a permanent underclass of people dependent on whatever scraps the people who devalued their labor decide th…

Last industrial revolution (late 1700-to-1800), we invented world-scale capitalism, communism, democracy, having rights as humans, war at scale and we burnt our planet. I think the results of a revolution are really unfathomable and not even imaginable to humans.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#314
post #166

Why should we assume AI can rapidly turn into super intelligence when physical and critical resources like energy and materials remain under human control?

Because perhaps it ends up deriving a way to pull off the same tricks using radically less energy and substrate. We do it in a few pints of mush with less than a lightbulb’s worth of energy. No reason part of RSI can’t also be about the hardware. Maybe the future is giant brains in jars. Maybe it’s hyperspatial manifolds. Who knows.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#315
post #257

There's issues where bad people with bad intentions use AI to do bad things. But to an extent the guardrails already built-in are sufficient. The real danger in AI is how it impacts society, our economy, and our perception of self worth. I'm not afraid of rouge agents nearly as much as I'm afraid of us building a permanent underclass of people dependent on whatever scraps the people who devalued their labor decide th…

The world is in a crisis of trust. We are losing faith in each other. AI has further undermined that trust; audio and video recordings can no longer be trusted like they once were. The impact is still being felt.

It takes longer to build than destroy. Not just trust. Anything. The lack of trust has created friction for everything; more regulations, deeper background checks, purchasing goods and services… the list goes on. Overall, AI is making this situation worse, not better.

That said, I have seen a revolution coming for decades, and I think this AI-paved road to dystopian hell should at least be entertaining.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I graduated a bit over 10 years ago some people were saying we'd have a permanent mars bases by now. When my parents graduated they were told they'd retire at 45 and have 3 days work week due to "automation", they're still working at 60+ today, more than back then actually People should open history books and gain some political/historical culture, this thread is 90% wishful thinking and "if the lines continues…

The "Yesterday's weather" argument works perfectly just up to the point when it doesn't.

Just like the "if the lines continues to go up" argument...

The thing is, no one has anything to gain from defending my position, but many people make a load of $$$ from selling the opposite position to gullible people

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to oddly not care what Hinton thinks anymore after he hasn't aligned with the groupthink naysaying of AGI risks: 'Hinton said there was a “10% to 20%” chance that AI would lead to human extinction within the next three decades.' “Because the situation we’re in now is that most of the experts in the field think that sometime, within probably the next 20 years, we’re going to develop AIs that are smarter th…

Hinton also said we should stop training radiologists 10 years ago because it would be solved by AI.

I was at a major radiology conference recently and the radiologists kinda seemed to agree. (The interventional radiologists are a little less nervous, for now.)

Apparently 80% of FDA-approved AI "medical devices" (which covers software, not just hardware) are for radiology.

(https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/software-medical-device-...)

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#318
post #257

There's issues where bad people with bad intentions use AI to do bad things. But to an extent the guardrails already built-in are sufficient. The real danger in AI is how it impacts society, our economy, and our perception of self worth. I'm not afraid of rouge agents nearly as much as I'm afraid of us building a permanent underclass of people dependent on whatever scraps the people who devalued their labor decide th…

Sorry for being off-topic, but 'rouge agents' was too adorable to leave unmentioned.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an issue I think about often, but I am not quite sure how to put it into words. We have many extremely smart people in various fields. Executives, politicians, and society generally ignore them and do whatever they want. I don't believe that lack of access to intelligence is our problem. How is "free" intelligence going to improve this? I don't just mean climate, but business planning, health, risk assessment…

AI will not help by improving extremely smart people. AI will help dumb people and dumb processes with "free" expert-level intelligence. Anyone could still ignore intelligence and make ignorant decisions. But the default mode would be highly intelligent informed decision. Example with health - a patient can read blood test results with Opus and get very good results for "free". This is far away from helping extremely…

Why would they listen to an AI, when their favorite podcaster says something contrary?

I am not trying to be funny btw, people take medical advice from podcasters over doctors. I have seen this first hand.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#320
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be trolling, but I like Schrödingers definition of life: living things avoid decay into equilibrium. Inference engines are trying to converge any input to a certain limit, and I presume that's close enough to an equilibrium to not count as living thing.

I am no troll, and I hate to look like one when, to the appeal of Schrodinger, I am forced to remember that announcement this month about Claude or something acting in self-preservation when threatened during testing.

> Claude or something acting in self-preservation

That was an Ad.

An Ad in the same style of many before it. Not through an ad agency, but the AI companies hyping their product by making their product seem scary and dangerous.

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